It's a Safer, Way More Complicated World Out There

... at least compared with the periods defined by the Cold War and the War on Terror. But with no guiding paradigm, where does foreign policy and national security go from here?

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov addresses the 67th session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York on September 28, 2012. (Keith Bedford/Reuters)

During the Cold War, American foreign policy experts divided
the world into two broad camps: communist and non-communist. It was a neat
paradigm that allowed for quick decisions: alliances, treaties, and even wars
pivoted on this paradigm: American stood for capitalism, the Soviets stood for
communism.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, everyone involved in
national security and foreign policy have struggled to create a new paradigm.
No easy enemies also means there are few easy friends. Without a simple
paradigm to define the world as good or bad, strategy has become incredibly
difficult to create and pursue.

As a result, what has defined the recent eras of foreign
policy in America have been defined largely by what they're not: the post-Cold
War 90s, the anti-terror 2000s, and now we are moving in the post-War-on-Terror
2010s.

Defining the world negatively is really just a process of
elimination -- it does little to help understand what the world is like right
now, or how we can plan for it. But what is the world? What do we, as Americans
stand for?

It is extremely difficult to define the world in positive
terms. At a recent international conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a broad
swath of the foreign policy elite from the U.S., Canada, and Europe all
struggled with the question.

Because there is no simple paradigm guiding world politics,
few can define, with any clarity, what our place in it should be. Without that grander
vision, strategic consensus and foreign policies are becoming increasingly
muddled. Policymakers plan for immediate benefit, and lose sight of long-term
strategic objectives.

"In a unipoloar or bipolar world, it was easier to toe the
line and stand together as Americans," Senator Mark Udall said to the panel on
American global leadership. "But now there's not one strategy we can agree on
for a variety of threats."

What does this mean for the future of foreign policy and
international security? It's unclear. One still hears among the elder statesmen
of the world a nostalgia for the Cold War: a simpler, more predictable time
when the western world knew what it was and what it wanted.

In many ways, the Cold War was simpler than the modern
world. But the world is also unquestionably better off than it was. Odd Arne
Westad wrote in The Global Cold War that the
competition between powers "put a number of Third World countries in a state of
semipermanent civil war" and made those wars harder to settle. This constant
state of warfare created in otherwise small conflicts the potential for global
catastrophe, dramatically raising the stakes of almost every interaction
between the two competing blocs.

The last two decades of post-Cold War policy has seen the
world agree to a single economic system. Wars are smaller, less international, and less
deadly than ever before, and the threat of global nuclear annihilation is
greatly diminished. Thus, the stakes of the international system are much
smaller.

But just because the stakes of global politics are far lower,
however, does not mean the complexity of global politics is lower. And it is
that complexity that vexes so many.

The appeal of the "War on Terror" policy framework that so
defined the 2000s is its similarity to
the Cold War: a state of semi-permanent war for the country, which also raised
the stakes of some conflicts and gave America the global mission of stamping
out terror movements. Mali, for example, is not just a civil conflict in a
backwater in Western Africa - it has the potential
for global jihad, and thus becomes an interest for the United States.

So why is the current paradigm of the world so hard to
conceive? Is it not enough to simply accept that the world is a bit messy, that
most dilemmas are not easy because there's no big enemy to unite views, and
that the eroding dominance of the old interstate system might mean we need to
think more flexibly?

Indeed, there is a fundamental attribution error in assuming
the world was not complicated before; even though the simple paradigm of the US-Soviet
rivalry is long gone, local politics and local wars are hardly more complicated than they were in the
1970s. But because these local politics and local wars do not fit into a global
paradigm of conflict, their natural complexity can't be subsumed to a simple
narrative.

That old, Cold War narrative wasn't so simple anyway. In
fact, for America and the West it was defined international politics as much by
what they were not as much as by what they were. While America believed in
freedom, the American government also supported horrific dictatorships whose
sole virtue was being non-communist.

Defining one's role in the world in positive terms -- by what
it is, rather than by what it is not -- is not an easy task. But if we approach
the world knowing who we are (instead of who we are not), then we can make
policy decisions with an eye toward the future: not just a temporary fix on a
pressing problem, but developing long-term solutions for a bigger payoff down
the line.

This sort of thinking does not come naturally. The
difficult work of making and analyzing policy incentivizes immediate thinking:
angling for a short-term payoff rather than a long-term benefit. It also flows
from the negative definitions of the world: If you don't know what the world
is, then all you can do is react to events as they appear.

Changing that entrenched mode of thinking is more important
than ever.

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Joshua Foust is a fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. He is also a member of the Young Atlanticist Working Group.